An Optimal Schedule Algorithm Trade-Off Among Lifetime, Sink Aggregated Information and Sample Cycle for Wireless Sensor Networks

Data collection is a key function for wireless sensor networks. There has been numerous data collection scheduling algorithms, but they fail to consider the deep and complex relationship among network lifetime, sink aggregated information and sample cycle for wireless sensor networks. This paper gives the upper bound on the sample period under the given network topology. An optimal schedule algorithm focusing on aggregated information named OSFAI is proposed. In the schedule algorithm, the nodes in hotspots would hold on transmission and accumulate their data before sending them to sink at once. This could realize the dual goals of improving the network lifetime and increasing the amount of information aggregated to sink. We formulate the optimization problem as to achieve trade-off among sample cycle, sink aggregated information and network lifetime by controlling the sample cycle. The results of simulation on the random generated wireless sensor networks show that when choosing the optimized sample cycle, the sink aggregated information quantity can be increased by 30.5%, and the network lifetime can be increased by 27.78%.